The Sustainability Equation: Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Fashion

Slow and Steady Wins the Race at Ethics + Aesthetics

Coming up Tuesday January 26th is a panel in conjunction with the exhibition Ethics + Aesthetics, which I co-curated at the Pratt Institute Manhattan Gallery. The panelists include Julie Gilhart, senior vice president, fashion director of Barneys New York; Mary Ping, designer and founder of Slow and Steady Wins the Race; Caroline Priebe, designer and founder of Uluru and it will be moderated by Sarah Scaturro and I

The Sustainability Equation: Ethics and Aesthetics,” will examine what constitutes sustainability within the American fashion system and will explore the sustainable fashion practices of American fashion designers including “Ethics + Aesthetics” designers Ping and Priebe.

“Ethics + Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion” is on view now through February 20, 2010 and features work by artists and designers including Alabama Chanin, Bodkin, Loomstate, SANS, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, SUNO, and ULURU, Susan Cianciolo, Kelly Cobb, Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, and Andrea Zittel and Tiprin Follet.

A full color catalog of the exhibition will be available at a discounted price made possible by a generous grant from the Coby Foundation, Ltd. To order the catalog click here. The catalogue would include a smock pattern from Andrea Zittel's smockshop project.

Uluru at Ethics + Aesthetics

Francesca Granata

Below are the participants' bios:

Julie Gilhart is senior vice president, fashion director of Barneys New York, a high-end luxury specialty store based in the United States. In spring 2007, she spearheaded the development of an all-organic collection of casual, sexy clothes that are available in every Barneys New York store in the country. She has inspired many designers to develop “sustainable” products and was instrumental in the creation of Barneys’ 2007 holiday campaign titled “Have a Green Holiday,” which focused on environmentally-conscious fashion products. Gilhart believes there is an essential need to increase awareness of the development of sustainable products and how the customer makes buying decisions. She works to instill changes in the fashion business that leave a lighter footprint on the earth and promote more conscious consumerism.

Mary Ping’s Slow and Steady Wins the Race is an experimental “laboratory” line that stemmed from a desire to dissect the fashion vocabulary and led to an exploration of patterns of consumption and brand identities. The label’s mission is to “promote and produce interesting and significant pieces from the simplest fabrics and materials.” Following a product design model, the company is intent on slowing down the fashion cycle by creating non-seasonal pieces focused on specific and fundamental characteristics of clothing design. In addition, the designs are produced in limited numbers and sold at a contained price.

The garments of Uluru’s Caroline Priebe are tightly focused for maximum ecological impact and emphasize a “less is more” philosophy. For example, Priebe’s Westlake dress has only two seams, creating a sophisticated, simple look that is reversible and has pockets. The Kathleen coat, a classic design based on her grandmother’s coat, highlights the longevity of design and its relation to personal and historical memories. The recycled cashmere sweater, adorned with appliqués hand-sewn by the workshop of Alabama Chanin, underscores the collaborative nature common to sustainable fashion.

Coming up Tuesday January 26th is a panel in conjunction with the exhibition, which I co-curated at the Pratt Institute Manhattan Gallery. The panelists include Julie Gilhart, senior vice president, fashion director of Barneys New York; Mary Ping, designer and founder of Slow and Steady Wins the Race; Caroline Priebe, designer and founder of and will be moderated by Sarah Scaturro and Francesca Granata.

Ethics + Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion

Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, Jordache Sheer Camp Shirt (Lucky Lime)

Opening this Friday November 20th at the Pratt Institute Manhattan Gallery is an exhibition I co-curated with Sarah Scaturro on the topic of sustainability and fashion. Titled "Ethics + Aesthetics," the exhibition had a rather long gestation, as Sarah and I began to discuss working on such a project together in 2005. Initially thinking of it as part of Fashion Projects, we eventually decided to develop the idea as a separate project. It was important to us to highlight American and in particular New York–based designers, as we both felt that US-based designers are often short-changed by simplistic understandings of what constitutes American fashion, which is often equated with commercial mass-market fashion. We also wanted to underline the importance of the local to discussions of sustainability.

Equally important to the project was to higlight new ways of conceptualizing fashion and its consumption and production models. The last section of the exhibition seeks to directly question the fashion cycle and its dependence on fast and constant change by suggesting a paradigm shift in how we think about fashion. Among the practioners included in this section are artists such as Andrea Zittel and Tiprin Follett of the smockshop, Kelly Cobb and Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, as well as the design company Slow and Steady Wins the Race, who promote a slower fashion tempo by suggesting novel ways to produce and consume fashion. Their practices foster the creation of meaningful networks and relations through clothing as well as challenging the seasonality of the fashion trade.

The smockshop offers a unique model for a clothing workshop that encourages the adaptation of a basic “uniform” to be worn for long stretches of time, while Slow and Steady Wins the Race makes non-seasonal quality designs that are available year-round. Kelly Cobb’s collaborative project underscores the labor-intensive nature of clothes-making by producing a suit with material and craftspeople located within 100 miles of her home. Zoë Sheehan Saldaña also emphasizes the labor involved in producing a garment by recreating Wal-Mart garments by hand. She later returns her handmade version to the store for resale in lieu of the ones she originally purchased.

We are obviously not in a position to review the exhibition, but below is a brief summery of the main concepts behind it. If you can visit the gallery, which is located on West 14th Street between 6th and 7th Avenue, we would love to hear your feedback, so please do leave us your comments.

Suno's Workshop near Nairobi

"Ethics + Aesthetics is the first American exhibition to investigate the work of artists and designers exploring practical and symbolic solutions to the question of integrating sustainable practices into the fashion system. Focusing primarily on New York-based practioners, the exhibition highlights the way designers address the interactions between the local and the global within an inherently interdependent system.

The exhibition deepens our understanding of what constitutes sustainability within the fashion system by building on the already established practices of using recycled, renewable and organic fibers and the employment of fair labor. Organized around three main themes, “Reduce, Revalue and Rethink,” it expands on the traditional ecological mantra «Reduce, Reuse, Recycle» by acknowledging the importance of aesthetics within fashion design.

Reduce focuses on minimalist clothing design, as well as innovative materials and pattern-making that promote versatility and longevity. This section includes work by Bodkin, Loomstate, SANS and Uluru. Revalue underlines the importance of creating an emotional engagement with the wearer by focusing on the materiality of clothes and their ability to retain memory and history. Included in this section are pieces by Susan Cianciolo, Alabama Chanin and Suno. Rethink advocates a paradigm shift in the way we think about fashion by directly questioning the fashion cycle’s dependence on fast and constant change. It features work by Kelly Cobb, Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, Andrea Zittel and Tiprin Follett and Slow and Steady Wins the Race.

Rather than one single solution to the issue of sustainability in fashion, the designers and artists included in the exhibition provide a variety of approaches to the paradox of aligning fashion—a discipline based on constant change—with the precepts of sustainability. In line with “slow fashion”—a concept modeled after the Slow Food Movement—they advocate for a slower fashion tempo, which fosters richer interaction through design."

A Catalogue of the exhibition is forthcoming--thanks to a generous grant from the Coby Foundation.

Francesca Granata

Towards Sustainable Fashion

Camilla Norrback, Autumn/Winter 2009-2010

A number of sustainable fashion panels and symposiums are taking place. In Antwerp, the ModeMuseum is hosting a sustainable fashion panel on September 29th. Titled "Towards Sustainable Fashion," the panel features the Swedish designer Camilla Norrback, as well as Mathilda Tham, who teaches design and sustainability both in Sweden and at London's Goldsmiths, alongside Margues Bergamn—lecturer at the Swedish School of Textiles.

Meanwhile, Fashioning an Ethical Industry will be hosting a seminar on Education for Sustainable Fashion at the Ethical Fashion Show in Paris on Sunday October 4th.

Also, I will be co-curating with Sarah Scaturro an exhibition on sustainable fashion: titled Ethics+Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion, which will open at Pratt Manhattan Gallery on November 20th. More information on the exhibition will soon follow!

Francesca

Fashions: Business Practices in Historical Perspective

A Lucien Lelong coat on the cover of the August 1925 issue of Tres Parisian, located in the Special Collections department of the Gladys Marcus Library at FIT. Photo by Sarah Scaturro.

The recent Business History Conference in Milan, Italy had a robust program featuring a large number of important fashion scholars. Thematically, the conference centered around the role of business in fashion, as well as the "fashions" that occur in business practices. At first it seemed a somewhat disjointed group of participants (it was easy to distinguish the fashion historians from the business historians due to their, er, more fashionable dress), but soon after the conference began, everyone could sense a unique cross-pollination beginning.

The Fashion Institute of Technology had a strong contingent present, as they were also sponsoring some of the conference events. Significantly, Karen Cannell, the new Head of Special Collections at FIT's library, was actively encouraging scholars to use this amazing resource, which contains not only historical fashion periodicals and sketches, but also important documentation regarding the business end of the garment industry. Operating at minimal capacity with restricted access over the past few years, many fashion scholars are relieved that this important asset is once again accepting research appointments.

One session with a strong New York and FIT affiliation was titled "Innovation in the Business of Fashion, 1900-1940". FIT Professor Lourdes Font started off the thematically unified session by tracing the beginnings of a globalized fashion industry with a paper titled "International Couture: Expansion and Promotion in the Early Twentieth Century." Lewis Orchard and FIT alum Rebecca Jumper Matheson followed up with papers on the topics of merchandising and the self-promotion of female designers, respectively. Associate Curator at the Museum at FIT, Molly Sorkin ended the session with her paper titled "The Limits of Expansion: Contraction and Collapse in the Haute Couture, 1920-1940," which effectively placed the end of the first real "globalization" period of fashion at the beginning of World War II.

Another extremely strong session was "From Vionnet to Dior: Strategies of Exclusivity and Dissemination of Paris Haute Couture." Featuring influential fashion historians and scholars such as Caroline Evans, Alexandra Palmer, and Dilys Blum, this session also had a thematic undercurrent about the rise of a globalized fashion industry. Véronique Pouillard started off the session with an interesting paper tracing the problems of copyrighting French fashion designs in the USA, an issue which is still very much a problem today. Alexandra Palmer, Senior Curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, followed up with her paper on the importance of Christian Dior's global reach, which was a tantalizing peek at just one aspect of her forthcoming book, Dior. The session ended with Caroline Evans' research on Jean Patou's "Américainisme," which was an entertaining view of how Patou embraced American rationalization and the American "look" to market his designs and grow his business. The influence of emerging American fashion business practices on the French couture industry was also explored in my paper on the French couturier Lucien Lelong that I presented during the "Entrepreneurs and Fashion" session.

Other engaging papers included Rebecca Arnold's on The Fashion Group in 1930s New York City and Phyllis Dillon's thorough explanation of the influence of German Jews on the American apparel industry. Naturally, there was a session on the ethics of fashion, which was to include papers on the toxicity of beauty products and the sustainably-minded brand Comme-il-Faut. Unfortunately, neither of these presenters showed up. However, Efrat Tseëlon's paper "In Search of the "Ethics" of Ethical Fashion" provocatively challenged the current notion of what constitutes sustainable and ethical fashion. She contends that today's version of ecofashion effectively fetishes and oversimplifies certain issues (such as the use of organic cotton), thus merely reinforcing the current fashion paradigm. She suggests holistic and inclusive investigations into the meaning of what constitutes ethical (such as issues of toxicity in products and the skinniness of models), as well as actively searching for a new fashion paradigm that could challenge the current one based on consumption.

This engaging conference demonstrated that fashion studies could definitely use more of business history thinking - one of the leading scholars out there combining these two areas is Regina Blaszczyk, who just happened to be the co-chair of the conference. I hope that more professional history associations begin to seriously consider fashion as an important theme, as the interdisciplinary nature of fashion studies lends itself to many fruitful collaborations.

Sarah Scaturro

Sustainable Fashion for a Living World

.A look from Susan Cianciolo's Fall/Winter 2009 Collection. Photograph by Sarah Scaturro

I will be moderating a panel discussion on sustainable fashion this coming Wednesday, May 27th at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. The panel features Rogan Gregory and Scott Hahn from Loomstate, Julie Gilhart from Barney's and Leslie Hoffman from EarthPledge. Issues that I'm hoping to explore with the discussants include the rise of greenwashing, the inherent tensions between eco-lux and mass sustainable fashion, the place of technology, and the role of the consumer. Please let me know if there are specific questions you might want me to ask (that is, if you can't attend the discussion yourself!) The panel discussion is held in conjunction with the Cooper-Hewitt's new exhibition called Design for a Living World, and the exhibition will be open for a private viewing an hour before the event.

Here are the details:

May 27, 2009, 6:30 – 8:30 pm

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
2 East 91st Street
New York, NY 10128
www.cooperhewitt.org

Members/Students: $10
Others: $15

Register online or by calling the education department at 212-849-8353

Sarah Scaturro